Relevance Theory And Its Implications For Controlled Reading Comprehension

Mainstream reading comprehension researches to date can be roughly categorized into three tributaries. First of all, from a philological point of view, researchers have demonstrated strong interests in vocabulary knowledge, taking reading comprehension as the simple accumulation of meanings of words and phrases. Second, by adopting psycholinguistic knowledge, researchers regard reading comprehension as three interrelated and recursive processes: perceptual processing in which readers focus on the perception of morphemes and store them in memory, parsing processing which probes into how readers use words to construct meaning, and utilization processing which examines how readers connect what they read with what they have known. Third, in the area of cognitive linguistics, researchers approach reading comprehension, by using schema theory, from two opposite information processing processes: bottom-up and top-down. In the bottom-up process, readers try to use their knowledge of words, syntax and grammar to work on the text while in the top-down process, readers use their existing knowledge to actively comprehend meaning. Though so many different perspectives have led to our overall understanding, our knowledge about the nature of reading comprehension is still not enough.The relevance theory (RT) is first proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1986) in their book Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Over the two decades, it has been widely and successfully applied to analyze stylistic features, translation, syntax, discourse, literature, advertisement and so on. Nevertheless, literature on its application to reading comprehension, especially to controlled reading comprehension is scantly documented. This thesis is an explicit attempt to explain...